Habitually Good

SLS – Same Language Subtitling is a technique in which lyrics are added as subtitles to film songs on TV programs. The lyrics are highlighted in sync with the actual words as they are spoken (or sung) in the song. Association between spoken and written is a proven method of improving reading skills. What makes this even more interesting is that they are doing this with Bollywood songs which most people watch as they are a very popular entertainment medium.

The organization leading the effort is PlanetRead.org. Dr. Brij Kothari is the founder of PlanetRead. He is a Microsoft Fellow, on the IIMA staff, and Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford. The project itself has received plenty of awards and is also backed by Google.org (the philanthropic arm of Google). This is what the folks at Google.org have to say about it:

“When a billion people are illiterate - two-thirds of them women and nearly half of the world lives on less than $2 a day - we believe it is important to examine the link between literacy and poverty!”

Here is the complete post on the Google blog. The PlanetRead website is located here, and the donations page is here. Here is the impact: One US$ gives reading practice to 10,000 people, for one year. And here’s my ClipMark link.

I only wish I had a lot of readers on my blog (for this message).

[tag]India[/tag], [tag]Social Responsibility[/tag]

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